Civil War battle site may be developed

Homes planned on Va. battlefield

CHANCELLORSVILLE, Va. — Here, where thousands fell in one of the greatest battles ever fought on American soil, a new confrontation is shaping up over the fate of the battlefield.

At the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863, Gen. Robert E. Lee defeated a larger Union army with a series of brilliant maneuvers that are still studied in military academies. But the victory came at a terrible cost, because the man Lee called "my right arm," Gen. Thomas Jackson, known as Stonewall, was mortally wounded by Confederate sentries.

This year's Chancellorsville conflict may not be bloody, but it is stirring emotions on both sides. At stake is a portion of the battlefield where a developer wants to build a 788-acre "new community" complete with stores, restaurants, 2,350 homes and 2.4 million square feet of office space.

A coalition of seven preservation groups has begun a campaign against the proposed development. Their first public test of strength may come at a hearing of the Spotsylvania County Planning Commission on Sept. 18.

Historians and preservationists say they feel a sense of new urgency as development has all but obliterated some Civil War battlefields, like the one at Franklin, Tenn., where the spot at which the Confederate Gen. Patrick Cleburne fell dead is marked by a stake in a parking lot between two pizza parlors. Others have been well preserved, like the one at Antietam, Md. Some 620,000 men died in uniform during the war.

"Anything that isn't saved in the next decade will be gone forever," said Robert K. Krick, a former National Park Service historian who has written extensively about the Civil War, as he paused at the crossroads where Lee and Jackson met by a campfire to plan their attack. "It'll be over."

Generations of creative artists have been inspired by the war and its battlefields. Stephen Crane's novel "The Red Badge of Courage" is set during the Battle of Chancellorsville. Crane was born after the war had ended, but artists like Walt Whitman, Mathew Brady and Winslow Homer witnessed the war firsthand. Later artists from Edward Hopper to Robert Wilson have continued to reinterpret it.

"A lot of these works are about reconciliation, but that has no force without the physical space to which the works refer, in this case the battlefields," said Peter Hales, a cultural historian at the University of Illinois. "If the space no longer exists, it's not about reconciliation anymore. It's about loss."